Benchmark Partner Peter Fenton On Investor Luck, Tech IPOs And More

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This past week, we were lucky enough to sit down with Benchmark partner and Twitter board member Peter Fenton backstage at TechCrunch Europe to talk about his magic touch.

Of all the investors in the Valley, Fenton is one of the elite VCs who has the most number of companies that are in the process of going public or will be going public in 2014. This group includes Twitter, Zendesk, Zuora, New Relic and a number of others. We asked Fenton what his secret was in picking the companies that had the legs to be a public company.

Fenton admits that luck has an important role in some of his successes and bets. He shared that he falls in love with the companies he invests in, with the passion coming from seeing the dynamic of a mission-based company and how the employees are growing with the startup. He adds that the current dynamic in this climate is to focus on an IPO vs. an exit (M&A was more popular in the previous generation of technology companies, he says).